


Words, and why you love them

by yesfir



Series: Words [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Anyway The Point Is, Awkward Romance, Fluff and Humor, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sex Work, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, M/M, Multi, NUFF SAID, Romance, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Species Swap, Trans Dirk Strider, Trans Jade Harley, Trolls on Earth (Homestuck), and too much worldbuilding, but I'd rather be safe than sorry, dave is a linguistics nerd, it's also vaguely implied that the sex work is underage so, i’ll make clear which characters, just like casually, karkat is a reluctant religious icon, oh wait and also, save me from myself, the result is, this is a mess, this isn't the focus of the work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:27:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28403217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yesfir/pseuds/yesfir
Summary: On a world which is sort of like our own, sort of not, trolls and humans live side by side and everything is is a little bit more anachronistic, a little bit strange; full of steam engines, gentry, and mysticism. And if you happen to belong to the lucky 30-35% of the population who have a soulmate, their words will appear on your skin if they fulfil two conditions: They must convey a fundamental truth about said soulmate, and they must be clearly communicated to another person in their presence.For Dave Strider, who after all these years is still just as excited to meet his fated someone, there's just one teeny-tiny little snag in the way. The words on his skin are in an ancient and practically dead troll language, and finding even one person who speaks it would be a stroke of luck, nevermind his actual soulmate.For Karkat Vantas, who has never left the temple where he grew up and has met exactly two humans during his life so far, the language barrier definitely isn't the main issue.(Companion piece to 'Words, and why you hate them' - see notes for update schedule.)
Relationships: Dave Strider & Dirk Strider, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Jake English/Dirk Strider, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam, Terezi Pyrope/Vriska Serket
Series: Words [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2080224
Comments: 4
Kudos: 45





	Words, and why you love them

**Author's Note:**

> basically, the idea is that this story will run sort of parallel with another story of mine, which will start posting during dirkjake week. once that one starts going, i'm going to focus on wrapping it up first (I have three chapters, and it's going to be about 6-8 all in all), and then go back to posting this one. That way, hopefully, neither will interfere much with the updating schedules I have for my longer fics. see, there IS a plan and i'm not going mad ;)
> 
> that said, ENJOY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the love of words is expounded upon; we gamely try to get to the point in spite of Dave; there is WORLD BUILDING, MEENAH; Dirk fully embraces being cruel to be kind; Karkat mocks his own religion; there are long and stupid troll words.

_ Dave _

Your name is Dave Strider, and holy shit do you like words.

Alright, so no one is surprised by that. Anyone who has ever found themselves on the receiving end of your constant need to communicate practically every thought that crosses your mind is probably legally allowed compensation for trauma caused by your intense, sweaty, dare you say outright rock-hard mancrush on the whole concept of words. The amounts to which you can simultaneously entertain yourself and bore others by going on and on and _fucking on_ about just one of the precious little guys and all its implications and history and spread knows no bounds.

So this story isn’t meant to show exactly how deep your love of words goes, that’s been well established already in the very first paragraph. Honestly, fuck ‘show, don’t tell’ anyway, sometimes it’s just much more succinct to spell shit out. Your love for words, despite what your detractors might say, isn’t measured in quantity. It’s not measured at all, as far as you’re concerned. You just really love words.

But to return to the point – at least for a brief moment, and allow the point a taste of your occasionally elusive affections – this story is about how it all started, and what it led to. And also, you suppose, about the other love of your life, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

It’s the whole soulmate thing, right? Everyone gets told the old tales, everyone watches the Disney movies, this isn’t news to anyone, but you have never been one to turn your nose up at some good exposition just because Bob and everyone else already knows how the story will go. So yeah, just like many of history’s greatest lovers, you had looked down one day to find that words had manifested on your body, and obviously that’s a lot of pressure to put on a nine-year-old who was just trying to piss in peace. Even so, you’d mostly felt excited when you later studied the faintly glowing pearly gray letters scrawled across your left thigh, like a tiny meteor shower now frozen permanently on the dark backdrop of your skin. You had a soulmate! Not an entirely uncommon occurrence, but you think it might’ve been the first time in your life when you’d felt special to someone who wasn’t Dirk.

Not that you actually hate being a twin, you’d never say that, but well… that’s just it, isn’t it? To you and to` Dirk you are and always have been ‘a twin’, but the rest of the world for the longest time, you were simply ‘twins’. Always plural, occasionally prefaced by the definite article, which somehow makes you feel even more like you’re part of an anonymous blob known as ‘Dirk and Dave’. ‘Dave and Dirk’. The Twins. You weren’t even identical twins, but until puberty hit you might as well have been, because no one could tell you apart. At the time you received your soulmate mark, neither of you had ever been treated as a person unto yourself.

Which is why it felt outright miraculous to realize that to someone out there, you were going to be as special as it’s possible to be. To someone out there, there was literally no replacing you.

You couldn’t read the letters on your skin, but at first this hadn’t seemed like a problem at all. Soulmates who speak different languages is nothing to write home about, it happens a lot. The words are always written in the same language and dialect as they were spoken, or at least transcribed to the closest equivalent that letters can achieve. This often leaves the soulmates of bilingual people with a mix, though of course it depends a lot on their lives and circumstances.

You’d just thought fine, you were going to have to figure it out. Break the code! It wasn’t just a different language, it was a wholly different writing system, and somehow that made you feel even more psyched about the task. You were going to learn the language and decode the unfamiliar letters one by one, digging out the meaning behind your soulmate marks as if your skin was a strange mix between a fresh canvas and an archaeological dig site. When you finally met them, you were going to be an _expert_ , and they wouldn’t be able to help being impressed.

And then you’d found out that the words were written in Alternian.

Listen, it’s not The Olden Days anymore, and no one thinks it’s weird if a troll and a human hook up, date each other, shit, maybe even get married. Which is to say that yes there are people who still think that because they’re objectively speaking morons. They come from all walks of life and anyone whose opinion matters – again, objectively – does not like them. However, if you look at matters on a more global scale, it’s been a while since most people raised their eyebrows at interspecies couples, and even longer since it was illegal anywhere.

But with soulmates, people get… weird about it. Most movies and books you can think of, even now, are all about tragic misunderstandings, heartbreak and conflict. If one or both in the main couple don’t die tragically, chances are that they both decide that They Cannot Live Together and go their separate ways. A lot of the shit you’ve seen tends to then focus melodramatically on the human involved who has lost their one and only love, while the troll to an absolutely offensive degree moves on just fine, as if it’s easy to lose someone who is part of your _soul_ just because you’re still capable of other romantic attachments.

The problem is, of course, that to humans a soulmate is expected to be the sort of romantic partner which a troll would classify as redrom, without exception. As far as humans are concerned, platonic soulmates hardly ever play any great part in any narrative. In the few instances where they are even afforded a mention, they’re almost always played for laughs or portrayed as sad. And no one, absolutely no one in a thousand ballads and epic poems and oral histories and sagas and novels, would ever share their soulmate with anyone. For much of human history, the very idea would be considered absurd. So naturally there is going to be some _friction_ whenever a human and a troll are soulmates, because trolls hold a very different view.

Add to this the fact that if you go back in history, a troll having a human in a concupiscent quadrant could be seen as counterproductive to the continuation of the species, which depending on the era might either get them culled or at the very least socially ostracized. The result is that trolls traditionally have tended to relegate their human soulmates to the conciliatory quadrants whether they wanted it or not, purely out of self-defense. Even though such practices are almost exclusively a thing of the past, it has nonetheless created a cultural aversion to having humans in anything but the paler quadrants, now justified by claiming humans are too soft and ‘naturally pale’ to begin with to qualify for proper matespritship or kismesissitude.

The sum of these unfortunate facts have contributed to what can only be described as either history’s shittiest trope or the longest-running soap opera ever, the cast of which consists exclusively of interspecies soulmates finding new and exciting ways to hurt each other emotionally, ruin each other financially and socially, and in extreme cases kill each other as well as any passing bystander, for good measure. It isn’t pretty.

All of that, however, had passed right over your head at age nine, and all you’d known was that people were going to make a big fucking deal about the whole thing. You didn’t actually care if you ended up in a kissing quadrant or not, you could care less about what society might think, because all you wanted at that point was to work out a way to find your super special friend who was going to like you forever. But you _did_ care about people feeling sorry for you, and singling you out, and making you feel even more tragic and lonely than you already did.

Listen, it was bad enough that you and Dirk had been left on the front step of the orphanage, not even in a basket but in an old shoe box lined with newspapers –

(You’d looked up the brand. Knockoff Doc Martens. You’d looked up the newspapers too, and for some reason it was all really niche conspiracy theory shit. You’d had what was probably your very first bowel movement in life on top of a front page that apparently read, ‘COUNCILWOMAN ADMITS IT: PREVIOUSLY LIVED IN BUG INFESTED APARTMENT. COINCIDENCE?’ It was all about how trolls could mind-control cockroaches and make them burrow into human brains, and then used these new meat puppets to pass dangerously liberal laws about not fucking shooting unidentified lusii on human land. Nice to know that one of your first acts in this world was to quite literally shit on speciesism.)

– and you really didn’t need any other reason for people to look at you as if you’d never amount to anything in life. The problem with tragic circumstances such as yours was that they made everyone feel like they were entitled to all the shit that genuinely sucked about your life, while at the same time patting themselves on their backs for every little thing that didn’t. Everything you had that was worth anything was an act of charity, and everything else was a suitably removed calamity which they could think about every time they wanted to feel #blessed.

Not that you’d thought about it in that much detail back then. You’d just known you didn’t want to draw any attention, and especially not any more pity. You were practically set for life on the pity front.

So you’d kept it a secret. Which meant telling no one else except Dirk. You already washed and dressed yourself, it wasn’t as if anyone was going to see it unless you made an effort. A great side-effect of having absolutely no filter and talking incessantly to anyone who could be persuaded to stand still for long enough was also that no one ever suspected you of keeping secrets.

Anyway, it was just as well that no one knew. As time passed and it seemed increasingly more likely that Dirk didn’t have one, he got enough unwanted pity without also being compared to you. True, this way you also got a steaming side of the very same pity, but it wasn’t as if you didn’t notice that Dirk had it much worse on that front. You couldn’t throw a fucking brick without hitting some idiot who still labored under the delusion that Dirk was a girl back then, and you’re absolutely certain that this was the reason for the unequal treatment. After all, _every_ girl wants a soulmate, right?

People are gross.

You kept your secret, and you didn’t talk about it much even with Dirk, only waiting for the chance to one day be able to decipher your soulmate’s words. Of course, that was when you encountered your second problem.

The thing was this: You’d seen Alternian letters used in company logos, emblazoned on shirts, menus, the list only went on and on. But once you actually started to properly research the language, you found out that this was all what was referred to as Phonetic Alernian or Modern Alternian Script. Due to the complicated and overlapping histories of the two sentient species on your planet, it turned out that once the Great Reform broke up the centralized empire of Alternia and abolished the imperial succession, therefore destabilizing the hemospectral hierarchy and allowing trolls to integrate freely with the human world… well, the actual Alternian _language_ was mostly abandoned.

Trolls quickly picked up the human languages native to the places they inhabited, and while still retaining parts of their original language within their own communities, this slowly morphed into dialectal varieties of human languages. Absolutely _fascinating_ dialects, no two even close to the same from country to country, even in countries where the majority spoke the same language, shaped by linguistic drift into distinct cultural phenomena. Actually, classifying it as dialects is a hotly debated topic, and while it’s obviously way outside your lane to decide about something that important, you do see the point and feel like-

But _anyway_ , the point is that written Alternian nowadays is more like phonetic transcriptions of each of these new dialects/languages, and nothing at all like Ancient Alternian, which is basically never spoken at all nowadays. Your average troll on the street would think you’re an idiot if you asked them if they speak it, and they’d have every right to. It’s an almost completely dead language.

Yeah. Three fucking guesses what the language written on your skin happened to be, and none of them actually matter because it’s really goddamn obvious.

Basically it turns out that the only people who speak Ancient Alternian anymore are either scholars, a few pockets of highblood purists – most of whom are actual survivors of the Reform – and a handful of very insular religious sects. The task seemed almost insurmountable at this point, but even so you weren’t willing to give up. If what it took to actually decipher the words was to become one of the very few human scholars dedicated to the subject, well, so be it. You knew what you had to do.

It was a damn shame that by the time you came to this conclusion, you and Dirk had already been living on the streets for a couple of years. Becoming a scholar was very much not a priority compared to finding something to eat and somewhere to sleep. You had to put the whole plan on the back-burner for a little while, at least until you had an actual fucking home.

Well, you did it. Together, somehow, you did it. Your first flat was an absolute shithole, and in a number of ways sleeping in a dumpster was probably better for your general well-being, but that didn’t matter. If you had a home that meant you could have a job, a proper job, one that never again would have to involve kneeling in an alley. So you both worked your asses off, saving and scraping until you could afford to move somewhere marginally less terrible, and then you could finally start saving up for your education.

Well, that’s what you thought. Except Dirk, the unbelievable bastard, had apparently kept a lot of things about his budgeting secret from you, fuck only knew for how long. One day he just came up and handed you a check. “Here,” he said nonchalantly. “For school.”

It wasn’t just enough to deal with all the expenses of getting you into a school. It was enough to get you into a _good_ school. As you sat there and stared at the exorbitant sum, tears pricking your eyes, you tried not to think about how exactly Dirk had managed to lay his hands on it. Sure, he basically worked around the clock whenever he could, adding side hustle after side hustle to his regular job as a mechanic, but still… it was just _a lot_ of money.

Finally, you’d mutely held out the check to him, struggling to speak through the lump in your throat. Your twin raised his eyebrows, demonstratively crossing his arms. “Listen,” you eventually managed, and once the initial blockage was out of the way, the words rushed out of you, “you should have this. Dirk, please, I’m not being ungrateful here, if you only fucking knew how insanely grateful I am- But it should still be you. You’re the one with the brains to- to actually _become_ something. All I want to do is study languages so I can find my soulmate, which as far as I’m aware is not a highly paid position anywhere, but you… you could do so fucking much, Dirk. Once you have a job that pays better, and we’ve paid for all your surgeries, then maybe I can-”

“I ain’t taking it,” he said with finality, and you’d known you were fucked. You could throw yourself against the immovable object that was your brother’s force of will all you wanted, and that bloody-minded asshole wasn’t gonna move an inch. As if to prove you right, he casually added, “If you don’t take the goddamn money, Dave, I swear I’ll donate it all to a fucking horse rescue. I won’t see a penny of it – I won’t be able to use it for school, or for surgeries, or even a shitty fucking hot dog off the street. And I’ll only be too goddamn happy to do it too, you know I love horses, and if you’re about to decide to be an ungrateful piece of shit about this, I might even love horses slightly more than I love you. So what’ll it be? School or horses. The clock is ticking bro, choose wisely.”

In fact, _Dirk_ was the one being a piece of shit for sticking you with such an ultimatum, and you could tell that he knew he was from the set of his jaw. But he also knew that _you_ knew that he was crazy enough to actually do it, and that you didn’t dare to risk it. Oh, and he also knew that for all your protestations, you wanted to go so badly that your actual hand was shaking, your knuckles standing out too sharp and tense as your fingers cramped up, broadcasting how little you wanted to let go of the check even as you tried to convince him to take it. Piece of shit or not, the reason he didn’t give you a fair choice in the matter was because he loves you.

This way, you’ll always be able to tell yourself that Dirk had forced your hand. That you’d made the effort, but in the end he was never going to let you give him the chance he deserved so much more than you.

This way, you can blame him, if you ever feel guilty.

With a chance like that, you sure as fuck weren’t going to put in some halfass effort. You threw yourself into your studies with the full fervor of your love for words, with your determination to finally find your soulmate, and your overwhelming gratitude for Dirk’s sacrifice. You crammed every hour with new knowledge, staying in the library until it closed and then relocating to the campus cafe, where you could sit for as long as you liked for the price of the occasional cup of dirt cheap coffee. Sure, it tasted like engine grease and may or may not in fact have been made from it, but at least it kept you awake.

It wasn’t too long until you could finally translate your very first soulmate mark, since it was one of the shorter ones, and the long wait that had preceded the event managed to make the whole, painstaking process seem more meaningful. The result was… well, not exactly uplifting, but it was personal and in a sense it was now something you and your soulmate shared. That was the important part.

 _(_ _I_ _)_ _DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT_ _(_ _ME_ _)_ _._

The tonal variation that suggested a singular first person in the first part of the sentence indicated a young person speaking to a familiar figure of authority, or possibly a lusus. Meanwhile the word you translated as ‘me’ was more accurately just the word for either humility, weakness, or a non-threatening stance, but conjugated to reflect on the speaker. The word could also technically translate to a kind of vermin known for infesting and polluting food sources, and could be used as a derogatory remark to indicate a useless or incompetent person, but you hoped that this was not the intended purpose.

Either way, your soulmate obviously hadn’t been feeling too good back then, and though it had by that point been delayed over ten years ten years, the sense frustration over your inability to help nonetheless hit you pretty hard. You couldn’t know what they had referred to exactly, or even if it was still something that worried them, but…

Yeah, okay, you weren’t actually going to speak the words, “You’re special to me,” aloud; you were not about to abide that level of sappiness from yourself. It’s not as if that would transfer anyway, not unless you were talking to someone else, which is even more out of the question. But you thought it, touching the beautifully geometric letters etched on your skin and quietly relishing in the knowledge that you’d finally done it. You’d taken your first step toward getting to know your soulmate.

* * *

_ Karkat _

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you hate being the center of everyone’s attention. This is rather unfortunate considering your life in general, and your current situation in particular.

Regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, you’re putting on your metaphorical grown-ass adult netherdressings and walking down the steps toward the crowd. The stairs spread like an almost perfect concentric circle in front of you, only broken by the narrow walkway which you and the rest of the Exemplarchetypes had arrived by. You’d tried not to look down; heights have always made you feel sick, but you don’t want to trip on the damn robes and make a fool of yourself either. In the end you just grab great handfuls of the fabric and hoist the robes all the way up to your knees, focusing only on the angry _smack, smack_ of your sandals hitting obsidian. Behind you, just audible above it, you pick out Kanaya’s stifled groan at your graceless decent, and Sollux’ stifled snicker at the same thing.

Below, a sea of other robed figures awaits, most of them pilgrims who by the look of them hadn’t even found time to wash up or change after their journey. You fight an awful impulse to flip them all off. It’s not their fucking fault that your life is permanently stupid, you remind yourself. They just want a connection with their ancestral culture, with history, with the events that have inexorably shaped their lives in a million tiny ways. They want to be able to draw a line from themself to the heroes they’ve heard about from the day they first wriggled out of their cocoons, and who can blame them?

You wish _so badly_ that they’d all fuck right off.

Stopping at the foot of the stairs, you do your best not to squirm as the crowd bows en masse, and to pretend not to notice how the pilgrims at the back obviously take this as an opportunity to sneak a closer look at you. A cerulean with a general unfussed air about her at the front straightens up a split second before the rest, the movement reminiscent not of a predator, but an animal large enough that she doesn’t need to worry about predators.

“Signfree,” she begins. You know that word, you’ve heard enough iterations of it in a number of different languages. But your interpreter translates it anyway, grinning as she does. When you shoot her an annoyed look, she winks at you, and honestly the familiarity of the gesture is reassuring. A couple of the pilgrims exchange looks, but since your interpreter is human, they probably presume that she is unaware of her transgression.

As if. Jade knows exactly what she’s doing, and she’s having fun with it.

The cerulean makes a low chirping as she relaxes the chitin in her vocal shaft slightly, but she doesn’t look particularly annoyed. “Forgive us our late arrival, for we got held up by a storm for a week, and have arrived only just in time for the first evening of the Jubilee.”

You wonder if her language is really that stilted, or if it’s the translation that makes it that way. It’s not like it’s not possibly to speak like a normal fucking person in the ancient tongue, and you’re personally well acquainted with Jade’s ability to swear like an angry fish peddler when she gets worked up, but you suppose that the occasion calls for it. The cerulean looks like someone you could have a decent conversation with, if there wasn’t all this grotesque pomp and circumstance going on.

Sighing, you make the Sign with your hands, eliciting a sigh from the crowd. “You are here now, that’s all that matters. Please, join us in a quick blessing, and then make yourself comfortable before attending the feast. The Jubilee is meant to be a celebration, not a fucking penance.”

...You did it again, didn’t you? Stifling your chagrined grimace, you hear Sollux fake a cough to hide his glee, because that’s just the kind of unrepentant bastard that he is. Kanaya does not groan this time around, but you can imagine her closing her eyes for exactly two seconds before opening them again, the way she always does when her patience is tested. Terezi does nothing to disguise her cackle further up the stairs, and the hastily choked-down giggle was probably Feferi. This time you _do_ catch disapproval radiating off the pilgrims, probably at her, and you clench your hands into trembling fists at your sides, telling yourself that yelling at them in a language they don’t understand and which Jade is unlikely to translate will only scare and bewilder them. They won’t actually learn anything from it.

Jade smoothly translates your words, presumably without the expletive, or so you hope. Then the sea of pilgrims parts, and an announcermonizer steps forward. You hop off the last step, which is too fucking tall for some reason that no one has managed to explain to you yet – or maybe you just didn’t hear while you were ranting, but either way you don’t care. You hear the little taps that indicates that one of the acolytes is putting Tavros’ chair down on on the floor, because apparently people here have nothing better to do than kiss your spinal crevices all day, but they still haven’t gotten around to making completely reasonable adjustments to compensate for how the temple is a stair-riddled fucking hopbeast warren. You’re pretty sure that the sacred caves would not become any less sacred if they just installed some damn elevators.

You walk forward, and behind you the announcermonizer loudly declares, “The Signfree!” Rather redundantly, you feel, but if there’s a point to at least half of the ceremonies that surround your every day other than ritual redundancy, you sure haven’t figured it out yet.

“The Soother!” You hear Kanaya’s measured steps right behind you, the swish of her robes, and realize you’re still clenching yours like a lifeline, as if eager to show off your frond hinges to the whole crowd. You force yourself to let go with as much dignity as you can muster.

Then there’s the customary pause to indicate the footsteps that aren’t there, the accusatory absence. The Diligent had abandoned you, that’s how they all see it, that’s what the silence is supposed to indicate. But you think of Nepeta’s little quirk of a smile, the way she’d stopped breathing with excitement sometimes when you read books together, the alarmed cries of the acolytes as she scrambled feral and laughing up the sides of the cliffs in the valley. No, she hadn’t abandoned you. She just… left. You can understand why. Your whole lives, you’d been told that there was no way that the two of you wouldn’t be soulmates, and in her case in particular, that was practically what had defined her life at the temple from day one.

So when the human letters had started inexorably bleeding red light all over your skin, well, perhaps she’d felt there was nothing left for her here. Perhaps she’d simply wanted to see the world. Or maybe she felt like _you_ had already betrayed _her_ , not the other way around.

“The Sentinel!” Sollux doesn’t actually make any sound as he follows, because he’s being an insufferable showoff and hovering across the floor.

“The Faithful!” There’s the muted rumble of Tavros’ chair across the stone floor.

“The Watchful!” Terezi snorts in amusement, as she always does, and the clatter of her cane is quickly followed by the pained hiss of pilgrims who hadn’t managed to step out of its range in time.

“The Pacified!” Gamzee’s tread is a lot softer than one would expect, and you mostly just hear the slight drag of his shoes since he doesn’t lift his feet properly.

“The Penitent!” You can tell from the rhythm of Feferi’s footsteps that she’s skipping on every other step, and smile grimly to yourself. That’s right. She’s never going to let them see if they get to her or not; she’s much stronger than that.

The list goes on after that, of course, as more minor Exemplarchetypes continue the progression behind you, but you tune it out with practiced ease, sinking further into your habitual pit of gloomy thoughts. It’s the irony of it all that gets to you, at the end of the day. The Sufferer, the Signless, your ancestor… If it wasn’t for him, the Great Reform would never have happened, and your whole species would still either be locked into abject slavery or conditioned to cruelty. The life of every troll on the planet would still be decided by the color of their blood, and never for a moment from their hatching to their death would they truly know freedom. No wonder, then, that the Order worships his memory, and teaches the history in order that the atrocities of the past will never come to pass again. You have _no_ problem with that at all.

But in this post-Reform world, blood is supposed to longer dictate the circumstances of anyone’s life. That was the whole point, that was what the Signless fought for, what he preached, what he believed in. You know the sacred texts front to back, backwards and upside down and practically standing on your fucking head, so you think you can safely say that you can be considered an authority on the matter. So of course the Order Of Sufferers had decided, with their customary complete lack of self-awareness or even the most basic sense of humor, to honor this vision of his in the most ass-backwards way possible. By hunting down the descendant of every major player involved in the Uprising, the Unrest, and the Reform, they have effectively made sure that the only trolls on the whole planet whose lives are still completely dictated by a meaningless biological quirk, are controlled thusly in the name of the very same guy who got tortured to death for questioning such practices.

Really, you have to laugh. Or you would, except what this means for you personally is that the temple is essentially your prison, where you will go through your life as a living deity until the day merciful death finally comes for you, and you don’t actually find that very funny.

The doors to the main cave swing open, and you hear the muted gasps of the pilgrims behind you, as for the first time they’re allowed to behold the miracle of the inner sanctum for real, not in carefully curated photographs or grandiose paintings. It _is_ a beautiful place, you won’t deny it. The Order has carefully carved out simple seats in the rocks far below the vast ceiling, which is preserved in every detail, lovingly repaired whenever necessary. The floor, on the other hand, is much further below than it had been in the day of the Disciple, due to erosion. Back when Nepeta’s ancestor inhabited these caves, it would’ve been much more like a cramped, confusing maze, not this gigantic cavern which offers a splendid view of the original sacred texts scrawled in blood above.

The view always makes you feel rather sad. You can only imagine the loneliness of devoting countless years to such a task, knowing all those she loved and fought together with were either enslaved or dead. What must it have been like, reliving her soulmate’s words with every stroke, filling this space with the echoes of her loss? Nepeta, you remember, had seen it differently. She’d shrugged and tilted her head until her neck was almost at a ninety degree angle, saying, “Well, at least she had something to hold on to, and the furreedom to decide to do it, right? She got to remeowmber him in peace. I think if I lost my soulmate, I’d want to be alone just like her.”

Jade nudges you gently, giving you an encouraging smile and a nod, and you realize you’re holding up the procession by standing here and staring like an idiot, as if you haven’t seen this fucking cave literally every single day of your short and disappointing existence. You sigh as stomp forward.

You know that you’re being dramatic. If the world was still what it was before, you would’ve been culled the moment you hatched, your life snuffed out before your death could even have any meaning to you or anyone else. When you remember what Sollux’ life would’ve been like, or Tavros’, it’s hard not to be grateful for the life you lead now. You want for nothing here, and while confined to the valley, between the endless stream of pilgrim gifts and the freedom to do pretty much as you please outside of rituals, it’s not as if you know nothing about the world. Any knowledge you might thirst for can be easily accessed either via the extensive library or the internet, and the same goes for a wide variety of different kinds of entertainments. And the temple is nothing like human monasteries, not at all. You’re free to fill whatever quadrants you want; even _encouraged_ to do so in fact, which is… awkward. So hideously fucking awkward, but you suppose you prefer it to the opposite.

In the latter case, however, there’s always the stipulation that it has to happen within the Order and the few outsiders which it employs, and honestly _that’_ s a whole mess of dirt noodles all on its own. As your brief and sorely regretted matespritship with Terezi had shown, the repercussions of a failed relationship in your highly insular world are mortifying for any involved parties, and just about everyone else as well. Which leaves only the visiting pilgrims, and obviously that’s not to be thought of. You’re not about to court anyone who comes here to worship you, that’s just _weird_.

The really sore spot, however, is of course your soulmate. Your soulmate, who is very obviously a human, somewhere out there in the world. Well, they _could_ be a troll who only speaks a human language with no troll variations thrown in, but from what you’ve read, you very much doubt it. The word ‘brother’, for one, makes it fairly unlikely.

_What sister? You’ve always been my brother, you idiot._

That one is on your arm, and Jade had grown very silent after reading it to you. That was before she changed her name, before she told you how her truth overlapped with those words. You touch the spot now, descending the gentle slope that leads to the central offering slab, because at least this one damn room doesn’t suffer from the curse of the one million fucking stairs. Your soulmate is out there somewhere, and you’ve been stuck in this place since the day you pupated. It’s not like the Order _never_ goes out into the world, but during the first twenty-four shitting _years_ of your life, they’d apparently considered it too dangerous to let you follow. You’ve been pleading with them ever since your first soulmate mark turned up, so that’s fourteen years, and some bitter little part of you whispers that this is somehow your punishment for having the ‘wrong’ soulmate, or just their way of stopping you from finding this inconvenient human. They already hardly know what to do with your close friendship with Jade.

No, that’s unfair. You’re sure it’s unfair. They’re just paranoid, because there are indeed some highblood purists still out there who would like nothing more than to take their anger over the changed world out on your very fragile flesh. But that will always be true, and you don’t actually think that growing older is going to make you any less vulnerable. Meaning it’s just not a good excuse to keep you away from the world any longer.

You stop before the offering slab, turning sideways to the attendant acolyte you know will be there. She shyly hands you your offering, a simple baked grain confection in the vague shape of the Sufferer’s shackles. All Exemplarchetypes will leave the same gift on the slab, and then retreat to the other side of the room. Then the pilgrims will one by one take one and leave their own gift, and once the Exemplarchetype gifts run out they will instead take each others’ gifts to complete the exchange. Whatever gifts they’re then left with will then be taken along to the feast. Though, like you said, hopefully not directly. Most of them look like they are in sore use of a shower and probably a brief nap as well, and it’ll be a more pleasant meal for everyone involved if that’s dealt with.

You’ve noticed that all the pilgrims who are lucky enough to end up with the Exemplarchetype gifts in their hands, always tend to share them around as far as they will go around their tables. It’s honestly very moving, these acts of selflessness after they’ve traveled so very far, and you always enjoy watching them finally relax and talk to each other. You draw in a deep breath, placing your offering carefully on the slab, and briefly catch Feferi’s eye when you step aside to let Kanaya pass you. She makes a small face at you, and then grins a huge grin full of razor-sharp teeth and mischief. Definitely no sign of penitence, there.

Yeah, maybe you should stop wallowing in self-pity for a little while and follow your own advice. This really is supposed to be a time of celebration, and you’re surrounded by the people you love in the home that, for all your griping, is still deeply dear to you. Besides, you think, and feel your pusher start to beat a bit faster, it’s soon time. Once the Jubilee ends, you’re finally getting your wish. For the first time ever, you’ll be leaving the Temple.

**Author's Note:**

> look not letting dave and karkat meet at all during the first chapter is practically my hallmark by now. this was the setting the scene chapter anyway, shhhh.


End file.
